PGIVORD

Hello Coffee Ritual bloggers,

I can taste the coffee with the perfect foam but being French I can't take the paper cup whatever it looks like.
I have to admit that it's also difficult for me to accept styrofoam and plastic forks. Fisher-Price toy style food can be OK for a moment, but less for a regular habit. The table, the cutlery etc form the ritual that will help collecting the individual together (and read further - it feels like the notion of service might be older than we think).
It's interesting to read the association of pressure-perfect-smile withcoffee as coffee would be a pavlovian reflex to pressure. That seems very cultural to me and I would love you to emphasize on the commercial aspect of selling a person with the beverage > the service is being sold, not the actual atoms of the product.
That relates very much to neo-liberalism and the merchandizing of culture, here is an article: http://www.rinf.com/columnists/news/neoliberalism-globalization-and-of-global-culture
Abstract:

Free trade zones open themselves up to the deluge of millions of products and services and a good proportion of them are cultural, though in a sense not understood hundred years ago.‘When all forms of communication become commodities, then culture, the stuff of communications, inevitably becomes a commodity as well. And that is what’s happening. Culture-the shared experiences that give meaning to human life- is being pulled inexorably into the Media marketplace, where it is being revamped along commercial lines’ (Rifkin, 2000: 140).

In addition to the conditioning aspect of neo-liberalism I suggest you look at how time is understood and used as a tool, asset, commodity in this new culture we’re living (can we still use the word culture..). Also the notions of property of a liquid, commodity, and private use of a container are worth questioning.
see you in class! PG
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